BigHand, a provider of workflow digital dictation for the legal market, today announced a new campaign, “Unleash Your Voice – Transform Your Firm,” which seeks to change how people view speech technologies. The new campaign refers to speech as “Voice Productivity Technology” (VPT).

Steve Butterworth, president and CEO of BigHand, notes that lawyers today are demonstrating a strong desire to “change the way they work to be more productive in the current economic climate,” which is prompting their interest in digital dictation solutions like BigHand’s.

“This campaign sets out to highlight the many varied ways BigHand is being used and how it has become regarded as more of a voice productivity technology than just digital dictation,” Butterworth added.

The campaign features three law firm IT directors describing their experiences with BigHand, but it rightly gives credit to other players in the industry. Of particular note is Nuance Communications, provider of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech-to-text engine, and Apple, which added the Siri voice-based personal assistant to its iPhone 4S last year.

“I think when Siri came out people really started to see the benefits of voice technologies,” says Justin Horne, IT director at Goldberg Osborne in Phoenix, one of the people featured in the new campaign. “VPT represents the same concept of using your voice to get things done. Siri allows you to command your phone, Dragon allows you to command your PC, and BigHand makes my lawyers more productive; you definitely see the adoption of voice technologies continue to accelerate as people realize the productivity gains.”

Rich Wills of Keating, Muething & Klekamp in Cincinnati is equally enthusiastic. “We continue to see voice technologies integrate their way into society. We are starting to change the way this type of technology is perceived, not as a dictation technology, but a genuine productivity technology that appeals to all lawyers,” he says. ” With the speed of communication that we see with email, texting and phone, VPT flows right along with all of that and will continue to be a bigger part of everyone’s lives as we move forward.”

We can only hope they’re right. But, hey, if you can’t trust the lawyers, who can you trust?